Serial entrepreneur Davis Smith donates as much as 20% of revenue from his unprofitable three-month-old startup to charity.

Venture investors, who see the popularity of Toms Shoes Inc., eyeglasses company Warby Parker Inc., baby company The Honest Company Inc. and others as validation for baking corporate goodness into a brand, love the idea.

Salt Lake City – Beanstalk, an online SaaS-based tax platform for small-to-medium sized businesses and their advisors, raised $2 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from EPIC Ventures, Deep Fork Capital, and former Wall Street executive and investor Jim Engebretsen. Beanstalk will use the funds to continue building its core tax technology and fund its substantial growth in 2014 and beyond.

Beanstalk is a platform that provides secure document storage, date tracking, and note and discussion archives. Founder and CEO Kurt Avarell, a former tax, experienced first-hand the problems with complicated and less effective tax software options.

Technology Crossover Ventures is a private equity and venture capital firm which seeks to invest in the internet, financial technology, infrastructure, e-commerce, communications, security, software and healthcare sectors. The firm was founded in 1995 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Todd Stevens, Managing Director, RenewableTech Ventures. Mr. Stevens is the founder and former Managing Director of Wasatch Venture Fund, now EPIC Ventures. During the past 16 years, Mr. Stevens has raised six venture funds focused on early stage technology companies with commitments totaling over $250 million. He announced Renewable Tech Ventures that will focus on renewable energy and clean technology companies in the Rocky Mountain region of the US and Canada. Prior to founding Wasatch Venture Fund, Mr. Stevens was a development and finance executive in the independent power/cogeneration industry. He has developed over 300 MW of cogeneration and renwable energy and has financed over $400 million.

Upcoming Venture Community Events

Sustainable Startups Series

Our summer Series is here!

Join us this Wednesday for food, drinks and inspiring entrepreneurial journeys!

on August 5th, 2014 - will be held in the Zions Bank Founders Room in their Downtown Salt Lake City location.

Join Us for WBI's

Deal Forum

This Deal Forum is a live pitch event and will feature a number of entrepreneurs who are seeking capital for their ventures. This event is designed specifically to provide a safe venue where entrepreneurs can pitch their ventures to a panel of investors for the sole purpose of receiving feedback on their venture, pitch content, as well as market opportunity assumptions, forecasts, or necessary milestones needed to become successful.

This is the essence of commercialization.

Presenting Companies:

Mezy -a new social messaging app for iPhone and Android combines the messaging platforms behind Instagram, Snapchat, and Geo Locked messaging into one single app, so users only have to use Mezy in order to stay in touch with their friends. Mezy is the easiest and fastest way to share photos and experiences with friends.

Nimble Knowledge - provides a technology that allows those learning English to communicate as though they were native English speakers.

Seed Worthy - develops the most innovative technologies for developers and internet entrepreneurs. BowTie, Seed Worthy's feature product, is an integrated platform that allows developers to launch their creations out in the world in minutes. Front-end, email, user management, linked development environments, analytics, e-commerce,...you name it! BowTie lets developers, builders, & creators do what they do best--make cool stuff. We handle the rest.

Unwind - is a booking and payment processing iPhone application delivering real time, geo specific availability of massage therapists; to connect with clients, and fill appointment vacancies through on-demand booking. Unwind takes a percentage of the massage service fee. Payment, tip, and rating of the massage therapist (and client) are all delivered through the mobile application.

Description: DiscGenics is a biotechnology company developing advanced spinal therapeutics to treat patients with diseases of the intervertebral disc.

Amount Raised: $3mm Seed Round

Date: Q2

News

If you are an Alumni Company and you have Press Releases on financing events, new product launches, or milestones celebrations; please email us a link to the news and we will include it here.

WBI - Sponsor News

If you are a Sponsorand you have Press Releases, corporate events, organizational news you would like us to share here; please email us a link to the news and we will include it.

Utah Business Lending Corporation has money for early stage, high tech companies. See if you qualify for a venture debt loan of up to $250k by contacting them today. UBL is the leader in providing financing to early stage technology companies. Click on the logo above to see if you qualify and to contact them today.

Snapchat and WhatsApp both account for 700 million photos shared daily. The average Google user is six times more valuable than the average Facebook user. Buzzfeed is big on Facebook but not as big on Twitter, where BBC is the top media brand. And 25 percent of global Internet use is on mobile, but only 4 percent of ad dollars is.

These are just some of the key Web trends that Mary Meeker of VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers shared at Re/Code’s conference….

(Reuters) - Initial public offerings for venture-backed companies slowed in the second quarter but the value of the transactions climbed to nearly $5 billion on the back of some outsized deals, making it one of the strongest quarters in recent years.

Data from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) showed 28 venture-backed IPOs last quarter, down from 37 in the first quarter. But they raised a total of $4.93 billion, up from $3.4 billion in the first quarter and more than double the $2.25 billion in the year-earlier period.

Whether you’re a startup or an up-and-running business, you should know what your total potential market opportunity is for your products or services.

I’ve coached many companies over the years, as well as judged several business plan competitions, and I’m always surprised by how most business owners can’t confidently tell you their total market potential. They tell me things like, “My market is everyone who eats dessert,” or, “Everyone in my community who drives a car,” or, “Anyone in the world who uses social networks.”

You may think these are your markets, but you need to drill-down and get more realistic and specific about the true size of your market, or lenders and investors will question your credibility.

Great companies start with great business ideas. But turning those ideas into reality requires capital — sometimes, a sizable amount of capital.

Many entrepreneurs dream of landing a huge round of venture capital to meet their funding needs, but that is unlikely to happen for early-stage companies. In fact, according to the National Venture Capital Association, only about 1,000 new companies out of the 627,000 new businesses initiated each year receive venture funding in the U.S.

A few weeks back the value of VC’s for the crowdfunding industry was extensively discussed. Why? Because there are lot of areas where crowdfunding and VC’s can connect. And though traditional funding and alternative funding are not as rigorously separated as many want to believe, there are some inherit differences that characterise crowdfunding as a different form of funding.

Tanya Prive RockThePost FounderTanya Prive in 2012 wrote an article on Forbes describing crowdfunding as “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.”. Rachel Chalmers refers to as VC money as “fuel for hypergrowth”. In addition, VC’s are in the business of making money for their own investors. Besides the target audience (crowd vs. VC) there doesn’t seem to be clear difference if we look at equity crowdfunding.

Healthcare venture capital funding swung from a decline in the first quarter to a five-quarter high in the second quarter with medical devices accounting for the lion's share of VC funding. Which were the biggest deals?

I woke up to an article in Daily Camera today titled Small Business Administration trying to bring SBIC funds to Colorado.

There are so many things wrong in the article I felt compelled to write about it. This isn’t a knock on the writer (Alicia Wallace) – I like Alicia and think she does a good job. Rather, it’s an example of the difference between signal and noise in any kind of reporting around the VC industry.

I’m an investor in over 40 VC funds around the world (mostly in the US) and three of them are SBIC funds. Each of the SBIC funds were raised in the 2000 – 2002 time period. On paper, only one is in positive return territory as a fund, but the SBIC leverage is a substantial negative factor for the LP investors in that particular fund. And, in the other two, I don’t expect to ever see any of my capital back because of the SBIC leverage. Furthermore, I don’t believe any of the GPs in any SBIC-backed fund would ever take money from the SBIC again.